Bekah Rife is a vegan chef and cooking instructor in Venice, CA. And if she looks familiar, that’s because her twin sister, Rachel, was a previous interviewee on “When I Was 17.” In addition to hearing Bekah’s story, I’ve also had the pleasure of eating her food, and I can tell you firsthand that she knows her way around the kitchen. If you want to experience it for yourself, check out her recipes on Rife.Style, or sign up for a class the next time you’re in LA! Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

I was so sports driven that I just thought I would keep playing sports into my 20s. My dad was big into football. He got a scholarship to college and he almost went pro, so he always pushed us kids to be athletes. I was doing water polo, synchronized swimming, and speed swimming. I didn't really consider life outside of sports.

There was a neighborhood pool around the corner from the house that we grew up in. We started summer recreation swimming there at age five. Then my dad would go on these long bike rides and he saw this pool where girls were doing synchronized swimming. He told my mom that he thought Rachel and I should start synchronized swimming. Twins are pretty coveted in the sport because they're perfectly matched.

I definitely didn't like it at first. I wanted to quit. But we were taught not to quit things. There's so much technique you have to learn, so many different skills and elements, to even be able to do something that looks like you're a synchronized swimmer. But then I really started to excel and it's fun to be good at things, you know? So I stuck with it.

Then I started playing water polo in high school and I really fell in love with it. So I thought, “Hey, it's not like I have to be the best in the nation, but there are these teams that travel around the world and play water polo,” and that sounded cool to me.

How did you decide to attend San Diego State University?

I visited San Diego frequently growing up because of swim competitions, so it was always ingrained in my mind as this warm paradise with palm trees. And being from Northern California, it's a very different landscape. It was definitely the goal to get a scholarship and play sports in San Diego, so it was neat when that happened.

I did both swimming and water polo in college. It was really intense. I liked the teammates and the camaraderie, but I was really glad when it was over. It's just very, very demanding. Sports is what I knew, but I think realizing that there was this big world out there besides sports was really exciting.

How did you choose your major?

I didn't really have much guidance from my parents as to what my interests were beyond sports, and I hadn’t done much self-exploration. Both of my parents were business management majors, so they both advised me to major in business because it's broad. So I did.

But I think I would do it a little differently if I had it to do over. I would definitely have sat with myself a little more and thought about my interests beyond sports. I think now I would get into something involving nutrition or health.

I did enjoy some of it. I had a lot of athletes in my classes, so we all bonded together and had a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed my electives like Spanish and women's studies and studying abroad in Valencia, Spain.

How did you get from college to where you are now?

I graduated from SDSU and that was really when my soul searching started to take place. I was just thinking, “What am I doing? What do I want to do?” I worked in restaurants for a bit, just to figure it out, because I had no idea. I also worked in VIP guest services at a hotel. And I did some traveling for a couple of years to sort it out. I did a trip to South East Asia, a few places in Central America, I lived in Australia for a summer, I did a couple of Burning Man's. I just really explored.

Then I did a competitive synchronized swimming competition in the South Pacific,which was super fun. So I picked up synchronized swimming again professionally. We started our own little group in San Diego and then LA and did music videos and movies and private events. We even had a full underwater gig inside the Dubai Aquarium - a mermaid show.

Then I started working for an events company, which I liked, but it didn't really feel like my true passion. When that company was downsizing, they told me, "You can take as much time as you need to find your next job," which was super cool of them. So then that's when I got into food.

I interviewed with a gentleman who had a rare autoimmune disease, and he was looking for a chef. I grew up cooking - part of my allowance was cooking the family dinner growing up - and I would watch my mom and my grandma who is a fantastic cook. I feel like the food thing was kind of in my blood because of my grandma, and that's where my base of cooking started.

So he hired me to cook for him. I was nervous, but I knew I could cook and the food I made always tasted decent, so I just went with that. Maybe it was one of those young and dumb moves, I don't know. But it worked and it went really well. And then he got a bit more sick, so he had a nurse there full-time. She was from Africa and she was a fantastic cook. Her food was full of all these cool herbs and spices and every time I walked in the house it smelled amazing. So that was good and bad. I had less work, but it also pushed me to figure out what was next.

Then I started cooking full-time for a couple. Their diets were a bit specific, so that took up a lot of my time. One of the women in this couple was a kind of serial entrepreneur and she had a tech start-up. Over time, she started to bring me into the company, kind of like her right-hand gal. And I still do that now.

Then I found this culinary program called Rouxbe. It's actually the largest online culinary school in the world, and about five years ago they launched a plant-based program. I was super stoked to find it because I wanted to go to culinary school but I also had to work full-time.

At first I didn't quite get it because the chefs couldn’t taste my food, but when we cooked, we had to take pictures of the stages of cooking. And then we had to be very, very descriptive about how things tasted and smelled and the techniques we used. I got so much out of it even though there wasn't a chef tasting my food in person. And I definitely got enough feedback from feeding the people that were in and out of my house.

I gained a real understanding of how to build flavor in that course. And I learned some of the science behind food, which has helped my cooking. And I'm just a curious person by nature, so learning the reason behind why we do things in the kitchen was fascinating to me. I also recommitted to the diet that I believe is the healthiest, which is whole food, plant-based.

The one area that I didn't get to deep dive into was nutrition, which is understandable because it was culinary school, it wasn't nutrition school. So I took the online Cornell Plant Based Nutrition Course, which was fantastic. I had a pretty good idea of how to cook for people with heart disease and diabetes and things like that, but it furthered my knowledge in that realm. I just wanted one more thing under my belt to solidify my education in the plant-based world, and there were so many good takeaways from that program.

This summer, I started teaching cooking lessons, which have been super fun.Sometimes with personal chefing, there is not a lot of interaction with clients or people; you just go into a client’s house, cook, and leave. So the food journey that I've been on has been making that connection with people and just chit-chatting about food. I felt like the lessons were the perfect way to do that.

I’ve got my menus live on Cozymeal, which is this app where you can have a chef come over and cook a private dinner for you. And then I also pitched my cooking lessons to Airbnb Experiences – it’s called Vegan In Venice Gourmet Cooking Class.

Sometimes I do the lessons at my house, but I also travel. Like last weekend, I did an 11-person birthday party and we rented out a big chef kitchen in Marina Del Ray. Or I had a couple celebrating their anniversary dinner at a nice Airbnb in Venice, so I met them at their Airbnb for their lesson.

It took me a moment to find my calling, which is in food and nutrition. It's where I feel the most excited and I totally see a future with it. I would love to reach a bigger audience and support more people in transitioning to being plant-based. I would love to host a vegan food show that blends traveling with cooking. I would love to be a resource to a greater group of people and support their journey to going plant-based.

Looking back, what seems clear to you now?

I wish I’d had more guidance from my parents or an adult role model who had said, "There will be life after sports, so consider what you want." It was such a stark life change to go from being a competitive athlete to stopping and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. It was just so much to deal with at 22 years old.

Some real mentorship and asking kids, “What do you actually want?” would have given me a greater understanding of what life could be like. And then you can go from there and decide if you should go to college or trade school. Maybe I would've gone to culinary school right out of high school. And don't be married to the one job you get out of college. Use your time to travel and see the world because that's definitely part of your education and it will continue to form what you actually want to do.

I don't want to put down my journey and I'm so grateful for it, but I think supporting people to pause a little more and sit with themselves and apply that to the choices we make when we're 16 or 17 years old would be good.

A few months ago, I was watching Bob’s Burgers on Hulu (highly recommend, btw), and I saw an ad that was a bit different from the usual cars and movies and fast food. It was this ad for Google’s new veterans search tool. Developed in part by Matthew Hudson, a former civil engineer for the US Air Force, this tool allows veterans to enter in their specific military codes when searching for jobs to help them identify civilian jobs that match the skills they developed in the military. And companies themselves can integrate this tool into their own search engines.

Hudson explains that he was motivated to tackle this project because of his own experience trying to find a job after leaving the military. He talks about the clearly delineated roles and hierarchy of the military, and how that made things even more confusing and tricky when he began to transition to civilian life. So when he got hired to work as a program manager for Google, he wanted to find a way to support other veterans going through the same experience.

Hudson explains the importance of this tool that acts as a translator between what service members know how to do and what non-military jobs require, “There isn’t a common language that helps recruiters match a veteran’s experience with the need for their skills and leadership in civilian jobs. As a result, 1 in 3 veterans—of the roughly 250,000 service members who transition out of the military each year—end up taking jobs well below their skill level.”

The reason this made such an impression on me is that this provides yet another way for young people to think about their career paths. Similar to what I wrote about last week, supporting veterans in finding good jobs when they leave the military makes the choice to join in the first place a much more positive and empowering decision. Rather than creating one path to a good job – a four-year college – our students would be much better served by having a range of options to consider. That way, they can opt for the post-high school path that’s right for them, knowing that there is a variety of supportive and satisfying jobs available to them.

I know Google doesn’t always get it right, but I’m impressed with the steps they’re taking to support and empower veterans. Good jobs should be available to everyone who puts in the time and effort to learn important skills, and that goes even more for the people who have risked their lives to protect our country and our citizens.

As college becomes more and more expensive, and applying to selective colleges becomes more and more competitive, I find that many of my students and their parents are asking themselves (and me) what college is for. Many people cite the statistic that four-year college graduates make $1 million more over the course of their careers compared to high school students. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff: $200,000 of tuition for $1 million. But I also read monthly articles touting the success of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs who dropped out of college and became billionaires. So what then is the purpose of going to college?

When Barack Obama stated in 2012 that everyone should go to college, there was significant backlash with people accusing him of discounting the value of jobs that don’t require a four-year degree. Obama later clarified, “When I speak about higher education, we are not just talking about a four-year degree. [It] can be community college or a four-year school, vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.”

I’m inclined to agree with Obama; a four-year college is not the right path for everyone, but higher education is essential. And many students would be better served by knowing that there are more than two paths after high school. It’s not just four-year colleges or nothing. In fact, several of the people I’ve interviewed for “When I Was 17” took alternate paths to their careers, paths that didn’t include four-year colleges but led to successful and satisfying careers.

Like Nicholas Edwards who found his way to quality assurance engineering after starting and leaving a four-year college. Or Melissa Smith who attended vocational school for two years to learn the skills she would need to be an assistant, ultimately starting her own thriving business. Or Josh Fisher who started with a post-high school internship in 3D drafting which eventually led to a career as a software developer.

As with my interviewees who have gone the traditional four-year college route, a job or an internship or a vocational program is just a first step professionally. Every single person I’ve talked to has had to adapt and adjust and occasionally make a hard left turn, and a bachelor’s degree is not an assurance against that.

So instead of pushing everyone to go to a four-year college, I think we need to remember that whatever you do after high school is only the beginning. As Kathy Rentsch, an assistant vice president of Quinsigamond Community College, told me, “What people don't realize is that community college is not the end. It's a step in a journey, and people will continue to go back to school and go back to school. People need to understand that that four years is not the beginning and the end, or that that two years is not the beginning and the end; rather, it's the beginning of a process of figuring out how you're going to manage a career and your skills and your knowledge for a lifetime.”

Ryan Kruis manages the statewide partnerships for the South Carolina Telehealth Alliance in Charleston, South Carolina. I met Ryan at a moment of transition in his life as he was preparing to finish graduate school and move halfway across the country to start his life with his now husband. Things worked out even better for Ryan than I could have hoped for, and I loved getting to hear the ins and outs of his professional (and personal) adventure. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When you were 17, what did you want to be?

When I was 17, I was a bit all over the place; I had a lot of interests. I was pretty involved in the church growing up, and part of me was interested in working with the church. I come from a long line of folks involved with the church, and I’ve always been very social and relational, so I was exploring avenues to try to work with and help people. I was very fascinated by religion and spirituality, but I also questioned that a lot, being gay and struggling with coming out in that context. I think that it was also related to my interest in people's stories and the way that people make meaning in their lives. But I had lots of other interests as well.

I was also very into science at the time and I actually won a big chemistry award. So I thought that I might do medicine. Right around then, I fell in love with literature as well. I started talking to one of my English teachers and she encouraged me to think about teaching English. So I went into my senior year with lots of different interests and I knew that I would need to do some exploring.

How did you decide to attend Calvin College?

I grew up in Grand Rapids and I went to Calvin Christian High School. The summer before my senior year of high school, I did this immersive program at Calvin College where we went to Turkey and studied church history. That gave me a lot of exposure to Calvin, and some of the people involved in the program were going into their first year at Calvin. I also had a lot of friends there already, and I had taken a couple classes there so I already felt somewhat invested.

I had considered some of the state schools like Michigan State and University of Michigan, but not very seriously. The other thing was that I got a scholarship that paid for my first year of Calvin, so that had a big impact as well.

How did you choose your major?

I went in pre-med, but I also took some sociology classes and some pre-law classes and I fell in love with all my English classes. And then I got increasingly involved in the Service-Learning Center on campus, so I became very interested in community development and social justice.

The Service-Learning Center did lots of different things, but as a student worker, I worked closely with the faculty to help them develop service-learning opportunities. I worked with Spanish professors and with some of the English professors to develop opportunities and spring break trips that intersected with their curricula. All the residence halls have partnerships with community agencies as well, so I supported that program too. That's actually where [my husband], Devin, and I met.

I ended up an English and religion double major. Again, it was just this fascination with story and how people read or interpret different stories to make meaning in their lives. I also studied in Hungary for a semester which was so great; Budapest has such an interesting history.

How did you get from college to where you are now?

I did AmeriCorps and continued working in Calvin’s Service-Learning Center post-grad as an AmeriCorps. Then a year after that, one of their directors left so I filled in in the interim, leading the student workers and running different programs. And then around that time, I decided to go back to get my MSW.

I had become increasingly interested in social justice and community development. I was out by then, and I was very interested in the LGBT community. A lot of the folks that I interacted with who were leading these nonprofits had MSW degrees. I also became interested in marginalized communities because of my own story of coming out, and I wanted to help others navigate that. So the MSW mapped on nicely with some of my interests.

I went to Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids because it was local and I wanted to stay invested in that community. I had built a lot of relationships with folks in the nonprofit sector there, so that made sense. And at the time, I was living in an intentional community with a number of friends from college. I was actually at the home birth of one of my housemates, and I cut the umbilical cord. So I was very much rooted in Grand Rapids and did not see myself leaving.

My program was two years long, and I interned at their university counseling center doing career counseling and psychotherapy with students for a year. I loved working in higher ed because it's a formative stage when young adults are leaving home and their identities aren't fully shaped and they aren’t stuck in their patterns. They’re willing to look at their behaviors and think about change. It's just a really ripe time for transformation and growth.

I also really loved the career counseling aspect too, helping students explore their interests and seeing how those might map onto different careers and thinking about different options that maybe they weren't aware of. It was there that I was first introduced to the term “career happenstance,” which, I think, has marked my own career trajectory.

There are two different career trajectories: one where folks have it pretty mapped out. It's a set plan. There are certain skills you need to acquire and certain positions. And then career happenstance is where you sort of fall into one opportunity after another and you have no idea where you'll end up. My husband, Devin, and I are sort of on opposite sides of that path, and establishing a partnership with him has impelled me to take on a more happenstance style.

During my MSW program, Devin was at Boston University doing his PhD program and we were long distance. When I graduated, I decided to move out to Boston, so my first job post-grad was in Boston.

I got hired by Fenway Health which is a federally qualified health center that focuses on the LGBT community (they serve a broader community as well), and I worked in their research department on a clinical trial looking at substance abuse counseling for HIV-positive folks.

I did that for three years, but in the process I took on more leadership roles, managing more of the grant aspects and reporting aspects of the study, and then taking on a few other research studies oriented towards different counseling interventions for the same community.

I went into my MSW hoping to have the opportunity to do something that addressed the queer community, so finding myself at this health center in Boston was such an exciting opportunity and also kind of the fulfillment of a lot of things that I had hoped for.

After working on that research study for three years, I transitioned into managing a grant that helped support different AIDS service organizations around the country adjust to the Affordable Care Act and think about how to transform their healthcare practices in more sustainable ways. I also started working on our LGBT health education center, where we would go around the country training other community health centers on LGBTQ health in ways that could make their practices and health centers more LGBT-competent and inclusive. So I was there for five years altogether.

Then I started working at MIT on a campus-wide suicide prevention program. We tried to look at different aspects of MIT from the culture to the policy to pinpoint some ways we could address suicide systematically. I worked there for a little over a year and then my husband got a job in South Carolina so we moved down here.

By that time, I had started to think of myself as a social worker with experience in public health and project management. So I was interested in finding a job in healthcare that mapped on to that. The Medical University of South Carolina was one of the main places doing health science research and public health interventions. And I was really fortuitous that a job opened up in their telehealth department.

Telehealth is using technology, video, internet, etc. to extend healthcare access in new and innovative ways. Like in South Carolina, along the I-95 corridor, some of the health outcomes among kids rival those in developing countries just because of poverty and systemic racism. In light of that, there are a lot of opportunities that telehealth presents. For example, we've got some counties here where there's maybe one pediatrician in the whole county. But there are schools in all of these counties and a lot of these school have nurses. So we can connect those school nurses to a pediatrician in Charleston, and kids can go to their school nurse and get their care that way.

Another big program of ours is for strokes. If you have a stroke, being close to a stroke care center is critical. The longer it takes to get it addressed and get the medication, the more your brain dies. In 2008, only 37% of folks in South Carolina lived within an hour of comprehensive stroke care. But what we've done now is we've equipped all of these emergency rooms with stroke carts, and you can go to your local small community hospital and the ER doctor can telehealth with one of our stroke doctors here and get a consult. Now 96% of folks in South Carolina live within an hour of stroke care because we've enabled all these rural hospitals to be able to access our doctors here.

At first, telehealth was an example of how to extend access if that's a problem. But increasingly, it's becoming a standard of care across the board. One of the reasons we're on the forefront is that our state legislature didn't expand Medicaid, but they invested a lot of funding in this. So we can evaluate our programs and share some of our successes and barriers with other folks nationally. I think it'll be more and more common in the future.

One of the things I appreciate about my degree and my experience is that it's pretty versatile. I've worked in suicide, I’ve worked in substance abuse, I’ve worked in training and education, I’ve worked in grant management. And now I'm in this telehealth space. So it's hard for me to actually imagine myself five years from now, what exactly I'll be doing.

Looking back, what seems clear to you now?

I am a product of the humanities. I think people should study what they love and get experiences along the way that complement that. I work with a bunch of physicians and public health scientists, many of whom don't have humanities backgrounds, so I'm really grateful for the way my education allows me to see the world differently in this role. And so, I would encourage students not to shy away from those degrees in college that seem impractical; the job will follow.

I'm kind of prone to anxiety generally, so not having a set plan can be hardat times. But I think just sort of trusting that something will come along that will be a good fit would have made things easier. And this comes with a high level of privilege and I acknowledge that. But I've had to take some leaps to try something new and that has always paid off for me, even if it comes with some anxiety in the process.

What is the When I Was 17 Project?

When I Was 17 is a blog series dedicated to collecting the varied stories of people's career paths, what they envisioned themselves doing when they were teenagers and how that evolved over the course of their lives. I started this project with the goal of illustrating that it's okay not to know exactly what you want to do when you're 17; many successful people didn't, and these are a few of their stories.